How to Analyze a First Chapter If you want to publish your manuscript, you need to learn how to write well-structured scenes that hook and engage your readers. You also need to learn how to balance fun and important details that work with structure. In other words, you need a scene where every line weaves… Read more »
Are you getting excited? Is your literary heart starting to quicken? Why? Because it’s almost fall, and soon a good portion of us will be reading under the golden light of autumn. Is there anything so romantic yet word nerdy? I think not. as many in our community head back to the classroom, I thought… Read more »
Creating characters in our books is never entirely straightforward, and so many are influenced by our own lives and the people in them; one might think it would make writing them easier, but that’s not always the case. There are so many reasons for starting over in life, and they all come with their own… Read more »
It would have been much easier—at least, from the point of view of research—to write a novel about the life of painter Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun. Le Brun’s surviving output is extensive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York did a massive exhibition of her work in 2016. To top it off, she left… Read more »
Writers have vivid imaginations, so I am asking you to use this creative gift and imagine, for a moment, they nominated you for a Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s a stretch, but play along so I can make my point. You did not take the prize but are gracious and want to congratulate the winner…. Read more »
As I write this article, I am in the company of my two spider plants. They live in a corner where they get some light from the overhead tape LEDs when I work during the day. My office does not have a window for them to receive direct daylight. They are surviving but not necessarily… Read more »
I live in a house built in the 1800’s, so you’d think it would be easy for me to imagine the life of the 19th century character in my new novel Long Shadows. Tom Smiley is now a ghost in his boyhood home of the same vintage who is so deeply scarred by his time… Read more »
Time management is an important skill that can be difficult to achieve for authors. You can’t just hope it will happen, you need to work on it. This can be difficult when you have a busy schedule and you’re trying to balance work, school, extracurricular activities, and family. Fortunately, there is an alternative to traditional… Read more »
Most of us have memories of fairy tales. Maybe your parents told you a story of a princess who saves a prince from a curse with her kiss, perhaps a babysitter tucked you in while recounting the exploits of a very sly fox and how he came to the lion’s court to face judgment, or… Read more »
All authors dream of their own version of success: perhaps it’s making a living from their writing; or resonating with their readers; or receiving rave reviews… I have done all of these things and more by writing in a series, and today, I want to share my top five tips for doing just that. What… Read more »
